We had a great few days staying at Airlie Beach and a quick look around the area. One of the highlights was a trip to Daydream Island, Hamilton Island and Whitehaven beach (see post). Airlie beach is a nice place to stay (in the winter), reasonably quiet, a nice place to walk around and good spot to explore the area from.

Airlie Beach is a tourist destination, extremely popular with backpackers. Its beach is small and the sea is inhabited by marine stingers, the box jellyfish from November to May. In order to provide somewhere for visitors to swim, the local council, has built a swimming lagoon on the foreshore. The photo above is main entrance to the beach and lagoon area from the middle of the shopping Centre.

 The foreshore and beaches beside the lagoon The man-made lagoon at Airlie Beach, right next to the main shopping centre. It was quiet while we were there (in the middle of winter) but I imagine it gets very busy in the summer. Airlie Beach is a tourist destination, extremely popular with backpackers. Its beach is small and the sea is inhabited by marine stingers, the box jellyfish (Chironex fleckeri) from November to May. In order to provide somewhere for the visitors tourists to swim, the local council, has built a small – medium-sized swimming lagoon on the foreshore, similar to the lagoon found in Cairns. The Airlie Beach Lagoon is 4,300 m² and 4.5 million litres of fresh, self chlorinated water.^[4]

 Shute Harbour – just a few kilometers from Airlie Beach. This is one of the departure points for tours to the Whitsuday Islands. Shute Harbour

We sat at a picnic table beside the beach to eat lunch and we just happened to look up, there were lots of coconuts on the tree right above us – a silly place to put a picnic table!!!! Or a coconut tree!

There are many beautiful beaches around this area but after a while you forget the names 🙂

The ugly side of the sugar cane industry!! This one is at Proserpine.

Mackay – we drove about an hour down the coast to Mackay which we had missed on the way to Airlie beach as it was getting late. We found this beautiful beach and walk to a great lookout.View of the beach from the lookout

 Looking south  Looking northBush turkeys were running around the rocks on the lookout walk

Lamberts lookout Mackay

Our little green rental car – very economical, we covered about 4,000km in two weeks..

While we were staying at Airlie beach we had a great trip to Day Dream island, Hamilton island (above) and White haven beach (below) – see posts